


if it's true

by historymiss



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-08
Updated: 2020-06-08
Packaged: 2021-03-04 03:26:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24606928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/historymiss/pseuds/historymiss
Summary: The shuttle carrying Camilla Hect arrives at the Sixth satellite just slightly ahead of the news of Palamedes Sextus’ death.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 37





	if it's true

The shuttle carrying Camilla Hect arrives at the Sixth satellite just slightly ahead of the news of Palamedes Sextus’ death. 

Camilla knows this, because as she disembarks, people do not look at her with pity, only curiosity. This doesn’t last long, however: Camilla without Palamedes is a puzzle with only a few outcomes, all of them tragic. She watches, from the corner of her eye, the way that interest curdles into sympathy.

Her fingers close like a cage around the copper-lined reliquary in her hand. 

The way to Master Archivist Zeta’s office is longer than she remembers. Perception, Palamedes used to say, is nine-tenths of reality (he would then laugh, as if this was funny, and Camilla would laugh too, because she enjoyed laughing with him). Likely the injuries sustained at Canaan House are making it appear so. Or perhaps it is simple dread. 

Either way, she arrives at the door. Pushes it open, ignoring the office hours posted on a scrap of flimsy under the nameplate.

Deposits the reliquary, gently, on Juno Zeta’s desk.

Camilla had rehearsed words for this, back on the shuttle. She had thought about phrasing, about formality, about duty. What her fathers would have wanted to hear, were their positions reversed. 

In the end, all that remains is the truth.

“He’s dead.”

Juno raises her eyes to Camilla’s, round and sweet and utterly unlike her son’s.

“I’m sorry.”

Nothing else can force its way past the clench of grief in her throat.

Juno reaches out and touches the reliquary gingerly, as if it might burn her. When there’s no reaction, she looks at Camilla again.

“Copper?”

Camilla nods. Juno tilts her head to acknowledge the kindness- nobody wants to be unexpectedly confronted with the thanergetic echo of the death of their child. Carefully, with an almost geologic slowness, she lets out a breath and closes her eyes. Camilla recognises the emotion as it lands. Grief turns you to glass, she’s found. To move too fast would be to shatter.   
“Tell me how it happened.” It’s the Archivist that asks, not the mother. Camilla does the respect of answering as his cavalier.

“He worked out that Lady Septimus was actually the Lyctor Cytherea the First in disguise. She’d been… murdering the others. He went to confront her, alone. Hoping to destroy her, he-” Her voice wavers, and her fingernails imprint four little crescent moons, red and sore, into her palm. “-he dispersed his personal store of thalergy in one, quick blast.”

A pause.

“It did not kill her.”

Juno makes a small, strangled sound. It might have been a laugh, or a sob. “He protected you.”

Camilla presses her fingernails deeper. “He protected all of us. The thanergetic interference in Cytherea’s system slowed her down enough to give us a fighting chance. He-”

“He performed admirably.” Juno’s bitterness gives voice to Camilla’s own, and it curdles like poison in her stomach. “He died a hero.” None of it sounds proud, only hollow, and sad, and tired.

Opening the reliquary, Juno withdraws a pair of glasses, the frame twisted and bent almost beyond recognition. One lens is cracked, the other gone completely. 

Juno presses the metal frame to her lips, and does not cry.

Silently, Camilla turns and leaves.


End file.
